The current DLC business model seems problematic

RestInPieces shared this feedback 2 years ago
Submitted

Apologies for the presumptuous title and post. I am just a player. I have no knowledge of the company's inner workings, I do not know your project priorities or how profitable is your current business model. What I can express, is how I feel about SE's DLC plan when it comes to the last couple of years.

Briefly put, I am not particularly happy with it. I do not presume to have data, but reddit, steam and twitter feedback indicates that a lot of people aren't particularly happy with it either.

The main reason seems to be the actual amount and nature of content that is being dished out per year. We understand that work hours aren't somehow unlimited, however your art department seems to be doing the majority of the work.

Many issues that involve networking problems, functional gameplay changes and mod support (which frankly are the game's lifeblood) seem to take a back seat. Same with exploration and progressive content - which some mods already partially alleviate the lack of structure and long-term gameplay just by changing a few config settings and barely adding any new assets.

Personally, I would be more than happy paying the game's full price, multiple times over, if the updates were more functionally meaningful. Whereas, I am rather tired of paying for updates containing just a couple of functional blocks/items, a planet of voxels which I will never be incentivized to visit, and a variety of cosmetics.

Long story short, I wish you would focus on the gameplay's actual longevity and polishing this diamond of a game instead of the longevity of a barely sustainable business plan that is slowly leaving ever more people disappointed.

Replies (4)

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I have to agree. In my opinion, the game needs more content for discovery (caves ...), exploration .....

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On yesterday's livestream, Xocliw said Keen is acutely aware of the need for more PvE content ... but that thought was based on their data indicating the majority of players operate offline in single-player worlds. He went on to say better PvE would only enhance multiplayer, so there's that.

If anything, more suggestions for what to put in PvE and how it should work would probably help the most.

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I sent a lot of ideas.

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Im on this too i have SE since they released the Frostspark DLC and i have to say the lack of gamechanging elements is frustrating. I like SE alot i just wish we would have more to do in this game. Every DLC so far i wtinessed just brought us some cosmetics and blocks we alredy could use via mods. I wouldnt mind to pay for a 20€ DLC just for getting some fresh gameplay element into it. Im not actually good at anything in this game besides getting all the resources i need. It doesnt take long for me to get every material in the game so i can build everything within 1 or 2 days.

At this moment i just build a small or medium sized fighter and thats it. What i do with it, i have no clue after that i mostly quit the game and dont come back for a while to do the same thing again and that sucks.


What i think this game really needs is a complete Survivial overhaul to keep players at it like:

-working NPC´s

-more ores to collect and more complex recipes

-better economic systems with an impact on the whole Star System and their factions

-more weapons to build on your ships

-factions that expand their territories and build more stuff (maybe we can watch them build an outpost too) or not just let them do something to make a change in the System

-Scatter resources across the Star System so you need to travel to spezific points in your world

-maybe add some extrem aggresive Xeno factions that are in constant war with the whole System

-add some Planet spezific Biomes and caves to explore and in space we could have a nice looking Nebula that spawns random in the Star System where you can find special Asteroids or an Alien race/faction

-maybe more flora and maybe even a little bit fauna to make the planets more alive (to be honest planets for me are the most boring part of SE besides beeing in a dust storm or something what is actually kinda nice)


I could go on for hours like this would make this Reply more bloated then it alredy is. I really wish for a new fresh wind in this game cause there are no good games out there right now that are like SE besides Empyrion but this game doesnt look and feel good. Hope the Develepors are listening to the community but else there wont be much of a community left in a couple of years or until a game makes it better then SE.

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The people complaining the loudest and most frequently are an extremely vocal and small minority. Keen has stated on several occasions the vast majority of players are offline survival players in SP worlds. The people screaming the loudest on Steam (Twitter and Reddit) all tend to be online PvP players and to be honest, are the most toxic people I've ever encountered.

It is a gross mischaracterization to say that updates consist of "just a couple of functional blocks/items, a planet of voxels which I will never be incentivized to visit, and a variety of cosmetics." They generally include more than a few blocks/items (the Heavy Industry update added 45 blocks, Warfare 1 added 17 blocks, Scraprace added 44 blocks, Sparks of the Future added 27 blocks). Some of these are functional, most are decorative. Every update also includes other things like skins, planets, scenarios, etc. Each update also includes many improvements and bugfixes.

Granted, I would love to see a lot more added to the game, too, but don't misrepresent that actual content of the updates.

Fwiw, it also doesn't make sense to acknowledge that you don't know / understand the inner workings of their business model, and then turn around and make the assessment that their business plan is "unsustainable."

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"The people screaming the loudest on Steam (Twitter and Reddit) all tend to be online PvP players and to be honest, are the most toxic people I've ever encountered" I wouldn't say "all". Even people playing SP survival have had issues. Heck, even the word "offline" hints at an issue. An issue they passed the buck on to Valve, but it could be from their own DRM as far as I know. (The issue being the inability to use the correct saves folder when severed from the net.)

What I do know is that getting full accurate demographics from a forum is a big pain, if at all possible (AFAIK, good chance it is not possible). I also only counted one steam forum post from my steam friends, which I find as a demographic hint that forum posters in general represent a minority. There is no way to tell how the silent majority is divided.

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"tend to be" is the softening modifier on "all." As in "all tend to be" which means "most." So yeah, not all, but I didn't say all.

By attempting to determine demographics based on forums posts, you have created what is called a "sampling bias" error. Many people making forums posts are people from the extremely small minority I identified, so by looking at those numbers, yes, it will look like a more even split.

However, Keen have stated in their dev streams that the vast majority of players only play in SP worlds. They have access to actual game-play demographics, which includes everyone, not just people that post on forums. So, yes, there really is a way to tell how the silent majority is divided.

MP players are a small minority, and from personal experience on a dozen different SE discords, it is always only a handful of people making the most amount of noise. So, by logic of inequality, if only a small minority of players play MP, and the most vocal people on MP servers are an extremely small number of players on that server, it follows that the people who are most vocal about problems in MP are an extremely small minority of all SE players.

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"By attempting to determine demographics based on forums posts, you have created what is called a "sampling bias" error." And you haven't?? (Atleast I acknowledged the limitations of where I was getting my data.)


Also, with how much you are talking about MP, I take it you didn't read my post very well?

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I want to add another thing: specifically about that "tend to be" bit: it refers to being the majority. I'm not even sure PvP even counts as the majority of MP plays. I've almost only have seen PvE in my MP plays myself, even on official servers (unless you count the extremely broken offline raids).

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For context: I am a PVE player/builder and I often play co-op with a friend of mine. Have never played PVP. As I said in the OP, I never claimed to have any data and my evidence is anecdotal, which is the reason this post is for. If you agree, upvote, if you don't that's cool too. I was unhappy with the warfare update but happy with heavy industry update - however, this post merely expressed the desire for more extensive updates with functional features as opposed to decorative ones, which, (personally) I would be happy to pay for.

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Offline survival player here, and my main complaint are longstanding bugs. Anything that is called Klang for instance :-(

If there was a bit more progress in fixing those, I might get some DLCs too. Not that I like the business model very much, but in this case it would be a "thank you" for ongoing good work in the base game.


Other than that, there are some unfortunate design elements, but those can be mostly fixed in the advanced options. The progression system for instance does not make much sense to me, but there is a convenient checkbox to disable it.

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